Page 204 - Aamir Rehman - Dubai & Co Global Strategies for Doing Business in the Gulf States-McGraw-Hill (2007)

186 Dubai & Co.

For fast-growing companies and industries, human capital is
often the biggest constraint limiting expansion. Business ideas and
funding may be abundant, but people with the skills and
motivation to turn these ideas into realities are not easy to find.
When firms do find them, they discover that these people are in
great demand, expensive, and difficult to retain. Certainly this is the
case with talented staff who know the GCC market—as
opportunities have multiplied, so have the challenges in attracting
and retaining a world-class team. Unlike many emerging markets,
where jobs with multinational firms are the most coveted by locals as
a step toward greater prosperity and mobility, the Gulf is a place
where multinationals must compete with public sector and local firms
that can often promise greater comfort, stability, and wealth-creation
opportunities—especially for GCC country nationals.
Since the boom in prosperity 1970s, the Gulf has been deeply
reliant on expatriate talent. Expatriates have played leading roles at
many levels of the talent market: bringing board-level executive
skills, providing technical and management expertise, and serving as
the basic labor supply across all sectors of the economy. Reliance on
foreign workers, viewed by insiders as a necessary evil, has had
demographic implications that few Gulf governments would have
expected 50 years ago—half the GCC states today are majority
expatriate. Governments have crafted immigration policies that min-
imize the political impact of expatriate workers, yet their centrality to
the Gulf economies must be understood by employers, marketers,
and policy makers alike. While demographic shifts and population
growth have made “localizing” the workforce (that is, hiring GCC
nationals) a political imperative, practical realities dictate ongoing
engagement of expatriate staff for the foreseeable future.
Savvy multinationals, in crafting their human capital strategy
for the Gulf region, should take a multistage view. In the short term,
the imperative is to recruit and empower expatriate talent with
expertise on and affinity toward the region. In the medium term,
firms should seek to attract and retain high-caliber GCC national
executives at the early stages of their careers. Longer term, multina-
tionals with serious ambitions in the region have little choice but to
invest in human capital development there.
While the Gulf represents a highly attractive commercial
opportunity for many multinationals, capitalizing on the